The board game retools for the Age of Starbucks

If you want to understand the American attitude toward capitalism, look inside your hall closet. There's probably a Monopoly game in there somewhere. Monopoly is the most popular board game in history, with more than 250 million copies sold. You may never have taken a real estate seminar or cracked an economics textbook. But if you grew up in an American home, and at some point it rained, you played Monopoly.

Smarter writers than I have tried to figure out why Americans resist the regulation of business and markets, often even when we would personally stand to benefit from that regulation. But you could...